


the battle never won

by youlovelythief



Category: Bleach
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, anti-ichihime, just so u all know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 18:13:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11583525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youlovelythief/pseuds/youlovelythief
Summary: Do you love me?he wants to say, because maybe that will make this easier.





	the battle never won

Ichigo sees.

Yhwach pulls aside ten years the way a blade is unsheathed, and Ichigo sees.

His bones tell him the boy is his.

 

 

 

After, he goes to the field—the same field, where she made her decision and he looked at her in that kimono, saw her whole and smiling. He dreams of this field, sometimes, even to this day. He knows he will never stop dreaming of it. Here began the pattern of their lives, the ebb and flow of them.

Ichigo stops and looks down at his hand, his fist white around the hilt of his sword. Zangetsu lands with a dull _thud_ on the dry dirt, but Ichigo watches his cold fingers shrink into each other again, watches the balls of his hands shake. He returns them to his sides.

“Ichigo.”

Her voice thick and hoarse behind him, his name scrounged from the back of her throat. Not weak—overused from shouting battle orders to her division.

He turns and knows that the world is cruel, has known it since he was a child but dispels any doubts he may have had with this one mirrored movement. He turns, and they have switched places on the field.

When he sees her, his chest tightens so viscerally that he has to grit his teeth to bear it, because before him stands a soldier. She’s always been a soldier, but when she steps forward, he sees her favor a leg, sees the way her uniform outlines the weight of a cast. Her hair is still caked with dirt, a fine film of white dust against ink black, the echos of Seireitei crashing down around her. Shirayuki hugs her side, fragments of ice clinging to her sheath that reflect the grey sun. Her vice captain badge sits firmly on her arm, this and all the rest of her resolute, unmovable, uncontestable.

Ichigo clears his throat, lets the silence hang between them.

She does not press him. Only stands there, and Ichigo understands that this is happiness, glowing in her fists, trembling at her sides like his. Her relief is printed in the smallest text, but he’s always been able to read it.

Ichigo looks at her and wants too much.

 _Do you love me?_ he wants to say, wants to close this gap between them and bury her in him, wants his body to memorize the mold of hers against it. _Do you love me?_ he wants to say, because maybe that will make this easier.

(Because he doesn’t know what he’ll do with that answer, because even if duty is duty and sacrifice means the one fight he will never win is the one his happiness stands against the very fabric of the universe, even if he’s been fighting his whole life to do _something_ against the grain, to be more than the sand lost in the rotator because all he’s ever been lost in are her eyes—)

Rukia looks at him. Rukia and her bottomless blue eyes, a sleek black form in the grass. A blade asking to be swung.

 

 

 

He says, “I’m going home.”

 

 

               

Karakura Town settles onto his shoulders, a familiar burden. He rolls his scapulae, a weight shifted in the atmosphere, knows he will grow used to it.

He drops from the Senkaimon onto the street in front of the clinic, a faint cloud of white dust cast up from the impact. His hands, when he flexes them, still shake, and when he looks up, the sun is already setting. The sky looms above him, awash in brazen orange and matchlight yellow and the oncoming purple twilight. Seireitei, in some areas, is still burning. Karakura Town is not.

“Kurosaki-kun?”

She stands at the front door, uncertain, a loose fist half-raised. Her back mostly faces him, her torso turned to look at him. Her hair tumbles over her shoulder in a low ponytail, a ribbon of sky tied to her.

Ichigo looks at her, and his bones cry out, again, burned as they are with the face of that child, round and smiling and grey-eyed. The same grey eyes looking at him right now, that have always been looking at him, that he has always avoided.

He wonders if that, too, had been a way to fight it. If he had always, somehow, been fighting it.

Fate or destiny or the future, whatever anyone he had ever fought had called it. They had all used it to taunt him—this predetermined patchwork of routes that crosshatched across his life. Fate brought him his powers, brought him his enemies, brought him his ruin and salvation. Fate was the track he could not escape, the cage he could not crack. He’d broken the chain tied to his soul, and still they’d told him he had played right into the master plan. He’d done all that he could, beaten every foe came up against him, saved the woman he loved and the very core of the universe from utter destruction in the name of keeping fate at bay—only to discover that fate never stopped. Fate always won.

Ichigo looks at her, and Inoue looks like fate.

He could just say it.

 _We have to have a child. In the future, I saw a boy and he’s the one who kills Yhwach and I know that he’s ours but I don’t know_ how _he’s ours and I’m sorry I don’t love you but one day I will because it’s already happened and this is how it’s supposed to end and we have to,_ we have to—

Inoue would understand. Inoue would take his hand, Inoue would say yes, because Inoue loves him.

Ichigo can’t do that to someone who loves him.

 

 

 

He says, “Do you want to come inside?”


End file.
